Stats

January 17, 2012

Help Wanted: Straw Men Needed For Progressive Campaigns

Demand is on the upswing among progressive's for any issue, however remotely plausible, with which to bludgeon Republicans. Peter Beinart is quick to the market with an innovative approach to playing the race card. After watching the Myrtle Beach GOP presidential debate Beinart concludes that the GOP is "ill prepared to compete in an increasingly nonwhite America."

I should point out that in no way did Gingrich suggest that African-Americans might prefer food stamps to jobs. That invention belongs to Beinart. And while he was busily setting up and knocking over his straw man, he managed to miss the core issue. And I do believe he missed it.

The number one problem facing black Americans is the same one facing the rest of America. There aren't enough jobs. Obama's crony capitalism, his heavy handed regulations, and his taxation policies are strangling the economy and obstructing the private investment needed for creating jobs at any kind of a substantial rate. Unemployment has recently fallen to 8.5% only because a huge number of people simply gave up trying to find jobs. The Obama economy is that bad, and bad as it is for white Americans, it's worse for non-whites, especially blacks.

But rather than focus on the central issue of our day, which is jobs, Beinart buries himself in the minutiae of politically correct protocols. He concocts a reason for African Americans to be offended.

...for Gingrich—a veteran politician from the state of Georgia, speaking at a debate in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday—not to understand why calling the first African-American in the Oval Office the “food stamp” president would offend African-Americans is simply amazing. The most plausible explanation is that Gingrich inhabits a cultural and intellectual bubble. A bubble called the Republican Party.

Obama is, in fact, the "food stamp" president, and the statistics prove it. But within Beinart's restrictive little intellectual bubble, the sin is for anyone, particularly a Republican, to draw attention to it.